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[jamesd86]

@jim & bubba:

From my understanding, the new dash will allow you to rip the game to your harddrive but you will still need the game at start up, to prevent piracy I'd assume. Now all we need is for the smart guys to figure out the keys/patches to get around this and there will be plenty of happy next-gen modders


mi centos dos.

[Heet]

I think I have about 100 of their 70$ drives in my garage.

[BrooksyX]

QUOTE(CesiumVirus @ Sep 17 2008, 07:44 PM)

20gb hard drives are extremely hard to find these days, which is why the price seems so inflated

Its not like microsoft was buying all the hdds off of store shelves. They had a special deal with the hdd manufactures and when you order millions of them straight from the maker your going to get a good deal. Maybe they could of cost $70 when the xbox first came out but there is no way they cost that much near the end of the xbox's life cycle.

[linearxtc]

Wow Peter Moore's comment about $70 8GB hard drives for the original xbox (near it's end of life in 2005) makes me giggle inside. This is probably just to save face for the fact that MS is charging an arm and a leg for their 120GB upgrade kit now.

Maybe he's thinking of the 120GB drives that were being used to replace the original's after being modded.

That being said I have no doubt that the hard drive was a significant cost to the original xbox. I would even believe he meant to say 70%. Well not really, but it most likely was the single most expensive component. But come on,  if he believes that I have some land he might be interested in....

[turk3y]

I think the thing is M$ got all their contracts wrong, they probably set fixed prices for the components which seemed good in the first instance, but as time went on they wanted to drop the cost they may have had no contractual agreement that their partners would drop their price. Every component from a 3rd party you seem to hear the same thing, it cant all be bs. The thing is with hdds although we can now get much larger ones for the same price, really they have the same components, its how the data is written to the platters thats getting more advanced, that dont just double the qty of platters every time they double the size. So if the drive is only 10 gig that don't mean it costs a tenth of a 100 gig drive to make, these two factors probably put them off sticking hdds in as they knew they would never really be able to cut the drive cost as its a fixed (ish) amount, only the size goes up but the end of the day the manufacturing costs are pretty constant, and as they dont make them they cant leverage price reductions as easily.

But what that statement also says is how they rushed head long into the 360, and we all wondered how they managed to release a system with such widespread heat issues, there you have it they couldn't afford it whilst buying drives in at $70, and they didnt test long enough to see it coming as most 360s last for a while, they probably saw a few die off early and then they settled and thought great we nailed it, released to the public for a mass test on a scale they never did and whack the the turds start hitting the fan.

[luther349]

150$ is way to much for a 120gb drive. i just bought a 160 usb 2.0 external  for 80$. and its a segate not some off brand. being the 360 hd is a internal of sorts it should be far cheaper.

[0794]

QUOTE(Merkaba @ Sep 17 2008, 05:05 PM)

its hard to believe M$ was paying 70 bucks for a 10 gig hard drive at the end of the life cycle for xbox1.  mayyyyyyyybe @ the beginning.

agree - regardless of supply/demand for 8-10 GB drives at the end of the life cycle, this is MS - they could easily have negotiated a better deal on the hard drives than $70 each - even if they had to use larger ones and restrict the "perceived" space down to 8 GB.

something else is really going on here for the demise of the original xbox...and my guess is licensing fees...

[madmab]

QUOTE(spamenigma @ Sep 17 2008, 07:40 PM)

they missed a trick! could have paid all the modders $20 to send their old hard drives back after *ahem* upgrading them

   

[frieko]

Guys, according to your logic it should cost $10 to make a brand new '69 Mustang. Cuz it's so old and obsolete and you have 100 of them sitting around in your garage.

There's a fundamental lower bound on the cost of making a hard drive of ANY capacity.

[highbomber]

I believe Microsoft was paying $70 per hard drive...

Every Xbox had to be the same, therefore they all needed 10GB hard drives. Now I know anyone can find a bargain basement deal on a 10GB hard drive but the Xbox had to have new parts. How many of you can find a brand new 10GB hard drive? It is near impossible unless it fell behind a shelf and was lost for a decade...

Microsoft had money invested in old technology, which can actually become more expensive to produce. You need to pay a company like Seagate to agree to produce harddrives which are only useful to your business. That company is going to ask for more because they can't necessarily mass produce the drives for anyone else. They have to devote a warehouse to old crumby drives and hope M$ will have enough demand for them to make the factory sustainable. That is why the drives become more expensive.

I also believe that is why Microsoft switched from the 20GB harddrive in the Xbox360 to the 60GB drive. It can be cheaper...

Just my 2 cents.

[Eksyte]

The average guy may not be able to find a 10gig easily, but M$ had a bulk pricing deal, so there's NO WAY they were being charged $70/each. All the clout in the industry that they have any people think they couldn't bully/bribe an electronics manufacturer into making the same drive on the cheap?

Yeah, the physical materials would NEVER cost $10 to produce, but there's no way they'd be paying 10x the street value, either.

The hard drive killed them because, without it, pirating wouldn't have been NEARLY as lucrative. They make their money on the GAMES, not the console.

[chronno]

QUOTE(majik655 @ Sep 18 2008, 03:01 AM)

This is the way I always thought why it would be that high in price.

Have you ever especially now tried to purchase a say  20 gig hard drive (NEW NEVER USED)?
Not to mention even finding a NEW 8 or 10 gig drive.
Well it is not easy.   AND gig for 1$ ratio is waaaay higher.
You can get a new 160gig for 50$ normal pricing at a hole in the wall computer store.
Thats 3+ gigs for each dollar spent.

A 20 gig BRAND NEW IBM ATA IDE hard drive from bizrate (quick search) is 57$  !!!!
a 20 gig SERIAL ATA is 16$ !!!   xbox needed an IDE.

At the time a 120 gig hard drive was new at 120-150$ (when xbox first was modded)
Now they are what 40$ if that.

So at the time a 20gig hard drive was still more than what it is now at 57$   say 70$???

Plus doesn't microsoft have to pay more for the casing they sell it in?
It cost more money  to make OLD items and at the time a 8 & 10gig was waaaay harder to find.

Just my 2 cents... I may be totally wrong.

Right now a 20G IDE HDD is outdated tech.  That is why the price is so high, they don't make them any more. Try finding 133Mhz RAM now a days.  At the end of the Xbox1 life cicle, a 200G WD IDE HDD from CircuitCity cost me $75, no joke.  To say that microsoft was buying HDDs by the batch at $70 a peace is ludacris.

PS:  I call bullshit on this entire article.

[johnnyrico]

the 70$ claim is just nonsense, and the 20 gig supply too, if they don't supply them, you pick the cheapest thing they CAN supply, 40 gig IDE's are too darn cheap these days.

[1hotjob]

QUOTE

I think I have about 100 of their 70$ drives in my garage.

You keep $7,000 worth of computer equipment in the garage?

[Reaper527]

QUOTE(luther349 @ Sep 18 2008, 05:11 AM)

150$ is way to much for a 120gb drive. i just bought a 160 usb 2.0 external  for 80$. and its a segate not some off brand. being the 360 hd is a internal of sorts it should be far cheaper.

the 360 harddrive is external. it comes in that enclosure that plugs into your system. if you mean the harddrive itself, take a peak inside your seagate and you will see that its a regular harddrive mounted into an external enclosure.

on topic, i find it very hard to believe that ms was paying that much per harddrive after bulk discounts. if it was that expensive to get the hard to find 8 gig drives, it may have been cheaper to get 20/40 gig drives and only format the first 8 gigs. (like they did with the various 10 gig harddrives that were in some xbox1's.)

i paid less than $70 for an 80 gig harddrive i put in my xbox in 2003, and that is just regular off the web, non bulk.